Memoirs by Robert Lowell

Author:Robert Lowell [Lowell, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Criticism, Poetry, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9780374712181
Google: Uao9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: FarrarStraus
Published: 2022-08-02T20:26:40+00:00

PART III

A Life Among Writers

INTRODUCTION

BETWEEN 1959 AND his death in 1977, Lowell wrote a series of brief memoirs of other writers, plus a memoir of himself as a writer. These memoirs, twenty in all, are mostly about poets, though they include a philosopher (Hannah Arendt) and two writers celebrated more for their fiction than for their poetry (Ford Madox Ford and Robert Penn Warren). Still, Lowell seemed to regard all of them essentially as poets. The memoirs were a way of remembering and recording a group of admired and often beloved literary artists. They were also an effort to position himself as a valued member of that cohort. Finally, these memoirs were attempts to compose small works of art in prose—jewel-like compendia of personal observation, textual elucidation, and powerful feeling.

Lowell wrote all of these literary memoirs after he abruptly ceased work on his personal memoirs. Beginning in 1954, he spent about two and a half years working assiduously on “My Autobiography” and his memoirs of psychic crisis. Except for the two concluding items in Part II, he dropped those projects in early 1957. Months later he began to write the “Life Studies” sequence, which appeared in 1959 as the final section of Life Studies. Also in 1959, Lowell inaugurated a new phase by publishing his very first literary memoir, “Visiting the Tates.” Others appeared at a fairly regular pace for the rest of his life: William Carlos Williams in 1961, Robert Frost in 1963, Ezra Pound and Randall Jarrell in 1965, Ford Madox Ford and Sylvia Plath in 1966, John Berryman in 1972, John Crowe Ransom in 1974, Hannah Arendt in 1976, and his memoir of his own career in 1977. Three other memoirs appeared posthumously: his short, seemingly reluctant memoir of Anne Sexton in 1978; a second memoir of Ford in 1981; and the T. S. Eliot memoir, in a rather inaccurate version, in 1987. Other memoirs—of Allen Tate, Pound, Jarrell, Warren, and Plath—have not been published until now.1

A distinctive feature of Lowell’s literary memoirs is that they usually interweave commentary on texts and careers along with the more expectable recollections of meetings and conversations. For Lowell, the writer and the writing were a unity. In his poem “For John Berryman I,” he asserted that he and Berryman “are words,”2 and he apparently assumed that the same was true for other writers. Beyond recalling the writers and their work, these memoirs also evoke Lowell’s experience of reading these writers. The memoirs disclose his grappling with his friends’ written language, his effort to assess their artistry.

In these memoirs we see a very different Lowell from the person we glimpse in his memoirs of childhood and psychic crisis. In those earlier memoirs we encounter a wounded person, at odds with himself and circumstance, seeking to discover a viable self within the chaotic elements of his makeup, and hoping to find a way to live and to be of use. It’s a flawed Lowell we meet there, hoping to make something valuable of his one “consuming chance.

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